This is the third installment based on a conversation with a friend today regarding China.

As in the previous post, I said the stories in China are following a different thread than the ones in the west. The same is the issue of environment protection.

If we treat a country or a culture as one person. For a person, as a learning person, when s/he first discover something, s/he needs sufficient time to experiment, explore and accumulate experiences with that new discovery. So when the west found how to use oil as the energy, they were just excited to push it to every part of life and production. With technology breakthrough, it is not just a new way of production. It also promotes changes in social structure and how people organize together. All these would take a long time to explore. So in the west, it took several hundred of years to finish that process. After having accumulated enough experience, it is time to reflect on how to better take all the experiences we already have and actually make our lives better. So now the west started to reflect on the environmental impact of the development.

For China, however, it is a different thread. For China, its traditional culture emphasized on harmony with the nature. But our recent humiliating history and crisis taught us that we had to develop and learn from the west. So we started our path of development. So far, we haven’t accumulated enough experiences with the development. So westerners imposing their own reflection of their own culture upon China and criticize China for its pollution of environment in a sense reflected the ignorance of the west of the thread of the stories of other cultures and still applying the same mindset of the old colonial time when they were invading, occupying and massacring people of other cultures.

However, the planet earth cannot afford another big country to live the same kind of life style that US is enjoying, especially considering the population of India and China combined together reaches about half of the world population. China doesn’t have to accumulate all the experiences of development by herself if China can learn those experiences from the west since the west already accumulated those experiences. However, the stupidity of the national borders and the mindset of people shouting boycotting Olympics makes the learning and sharing of experiences difficult.